Ain’t No Way Around It: Why We Need to Be Clear About What We Mean by “Digital Humanities”. Piotrowski, M. Technical Report SocArXiv, April, 2020. ![Ain’t No Way Around It: Why We Need to Be Clear About What We Mean by “Digital Humanities” [link]](https://bibbase.org/img/filetypes/link.svg "link")
Paper doi abstract bibtex Digital humanities (DH) has gained the dubious reputation of struggling to define itself. Articles trying to define DH have become something of a genre—however, more often than not the conclusions boil down to “DH is undefinable” or even “DH must not be defined.” A question that is rarely addressed, though, is *why* DH is supposedly undefinable. In this paper we argue that this is not because it would be, for example, particularly difficult to come up with a definition or because unlike most other fields, DH would not benefit from delimiting its domain, but rather because the majority of researchers that self-identify as “DH scholars” are actively opposing a definition. This is due to the fact that they understand DH as “contemporary humanities,” i.e., humanities using contemporary tools, not a new discipline. While legitimate, this view is irreconcilable with the understanding of DH as the development and application of a new—computational—methodology in the humanities. We therefore come to the conclusion that there is ultimately no way around clearly delimiting these two opposing views; we propose to use the term “computational humanities” to refer to the latter field, and we present a concise definition.
@techreport{piotrowski_aint_2020,
type = {preprint},
title = {Ain’t {No} {Way} {Around} {It}: {Why} {We} {Need} to {Be} {Clear} {About} {What} {We} {Mean} by “{Digital} {Humanities}”},
shorttitle = {Ain’t {No} {Way} {Around} {It}},
url = {https://osf.io/d2kb6},
abstract = {Digital humanities (DH) has gained the dubious reputation of struggling to define itself. Articles trying to define DH have become something of a genre—however, more often than not the conclusions boil down to “DH is undefinable” or even “DH must not be defined.” A question that is rarely addressed, though, is *why* DH is supposedly undefinable. In this paper we argue that this is not because it would be, for example, particularly difficult to come up with a definition or because unlike most other fields, DH would not benefit from delimiting its domain, but rather because the majority of researchers that self-identify as “DH scholars” are actively opposing a definition. This is due to the fact that they understand DH as “contemporary humanities,” i.e., humanities using contemporary tools, not a new discipline. While legitimate, this view is irreconcilable with the understanding of DH as the development and application of a new—computational—methodology in the humanities. We therefore come to the conclusion that there is ultimately no way around clearly delimiting these two opposing views; we propose to use the term “computational humanities” to refer to the latter field, and we present a concise definition.},
urldate = {2020-04-20},
institution = {SocArXiv},
author = {Piotrowski, Michael},
month = apr,
year = {2020},
doi = {10.31235/osf.io/d2kb6},
}
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